The goal of the Promise Neighborhoods program is to “wrap children in integrated, coordinated, high-quality academic, social and health programs and supports from cradle to college to career.”

It’s based on the belief that no one wants children to be poor and uneducated as well as the conviction that the solution doesn’t simply lie in more money.

It requires better use of money. It requires leadership, coordination and the discipline of holding people accountable.

“We have to ask people to rise to the level of greatness that we know they have within them,” McAfee said in an interview Wednesday. “This is not going to happen by being mediocre.”

And the people he means aren’t just politicians, philanthropists, social workers, teachers and parents. It’s everybody in the community.

He’s a man with a dream and no time for naysayers.

“Every time somebody tries to make it complex, I bring it back to them and ask, what they are contributing? My question is: ‘What are you willing to do to make it happen?’ Finding those folks willing to work and lead by example, that’s my job.”

Of course, money is important.

“Poverty is a big problem. We’re not going to solve it with $10,000 and $15,000 grants. It requires big leadership and we can’t shy away from the fact that it also costs big dollars.”

But, he says, it doesn’t take any more community effort or money than it does to build sports stadiums.

McAfee is doing on a national level what began at the local level 40 years ago when Harvard-educated Geoffrey Canada moved home to Harlem and realized nothing would change as long as poor kids from distressed communities — whether inner-city, rural or on-reserve — kept going back to the same bad schools, hungry and unhealthy, year after year.

He created the Harlem Children’s Zone, which has grown to 100 blocks and provides services to 17,000 children and their families: everything from health care to parenting classes. Canada relied on private donations because some non-profits and government agencies didn’t believe in what he was doing.

In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama pumped federal money into the Promise Neighborhoods. The first year, it was $10 million. This year, it’s $60 million.

The first step before communities get any money is they have to gather baseline data, set targets and prove that everybody — from philanthropists to the families — has a stake in the program and a voice in the decision-making process.

Then, once the program starts, every non-profit, every agency, every person (including McAfee) has to meet annual targets showing that what they are doing has measurably improved the educational or health outcomes of children.

As McAfee says, they have to care more about the children than about maintaining the institutions they work for or have created. And if they can’t deliver, they’re out even if that means $100,000 shared by 20 non-profits becomes $100,000 shared by two. “This is not about sustaining systems and institutions. This is about what’s best for children.”

While the model grew out of an inner-city neighbourhood, it’s being used in all kinds of different places from a small town in Kentucky to downtown Los Angeles.

Each community has decided where it wants to start, but all have the goal of eventually having cradle-to-career services.

McAfee says what he’s doing isn’t a job, it’s a vocation. And, in many ways, what he’s helping create is what has got him here.

Growing up in Kansas City, Mo., McAfee’s parents struggled to send him to a private school. They never earned more than $30,000 a year, but education was important to them. His Catholic education at school and his Baptist one at home embedded the idea that it’s a person’s responsibility to serve the community.

“I’ve been the beneficiary of people wrapping me with supports and surrounding me with opportunities,” says McAfee, who has a doctorate of education in human and organizational learning. “Every step of the way, people have picked me up and focused me on an opportunity.”

While he was working at the Chicago regional office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, McAfee had a passing acquaintance with a young senator named Obama. They went to the same Hyde Park barber.

That someone he knew — an African-American — could become president was one of the catalysts to McAfee leaving his safe government job and moving to the Promise Neighborhoods Institute in Oakland, Calif.

After years of talking about ending the poverty cycle and radically changing the outcomes of children’s lives, McAfee realized it was his time to step up and help lead the conversation to make that happen.

Michael McAfee is speaking tonight at UBC Robson Square Lecture Theatre at 4 p.m. Admission is free to the lecture, which is sponsored by the United Way of the Lower Mainland and UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership.

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